Interoception in Anorexia Nervosa

Anorexia nervosa is a serious psychiatric illness whose causes remain poorly understood, and which remains difficult to treat to this day. Many clinical manifestations of this disease can have their origin in abnormalities in the perception of signals coming from inside the body, but this remains to be demonstrated. In recent years, research in healthy subjects has shown how the brain constantly perceives the viscera (heart, lungs, stomach). The examiners will use these new, objective and validated methods to explore how the brain processes information from the viscera (interoception) in anorexic patients. In practice, they will quantify the coupling between the cardiac cycle and involuntary eye movements, as well as between the respiratory cycle and voluntary actions such as pressing a button. Finally, by simultaneously recording the electrical activity of the brain, and that of the stomach, the examiners will measure the coupling between the brain and the stomach. All these measurements, which will be compared between a population of patients and healthy subjects, will make it possible to determine whether anorexic patients have an alteration in the perception of their internal body signals and whether this damage affects several organs.